Happy Loss of the Petty Colonies We Never Really Wanted Day !

It's 4th July, and to my delight, Astronomy Picture of the Day has declared the existence of the Southern Ocean. Huzzah ! Congratulations, America, all is forgiven. I think I'll celebrate with a nice cup of tea and an episode of Sharpe on blu-ray. That's a very American thing to do, right ?

Independence Day must be very confusing for Puerto Ricans. After all, it was captured from Spain by the Americans in 1898. Not until 1947 were Puerto Ricans given the right to elect their own governor. How then, does this tiny island react on such an occasion ? As far as I can tell, by having a damn good clean. That's what my street appears to be doing anyway. The only other difference is a tenfold increase in the number of extremely obnoxious quad bikes.

On an unrelated note, it's well-known that Americans can't spell, preferring as they do to more often than not omit the "u" from most words, thereby making the spelling more logical, intuitive and wholly wrong. For some reason metallurgy offers particularly strange examples. First, they insist on "aluminum" but at least they have the decency to spell it the way they mispronounce it.

Secondly, and much more bizarrely, Americans can't do soldering. Oh, sure, they spell solder, but pronounce it sodder, which is just baffling. I've never heard of a soddering iron before, but it sounds damn dodgy to me. Good thing I'm not an engineer or I could be in real trouble. Being paid for soddering is surely illegal and likely to get you stoned to death in certain less inclusive countries.

I'll never look at this in the same way again...

CG project : viewing FITS files in Blender

Warning : this post may contain or allude to content of a scientific nature.


Any technology that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, and any technology that is indistinguishable from magic is sufficiently advanced. However, there's another, lesser-known part of this maxim, which is that any technology capable of viewing FITS files is also sufficiently advanced and therefore magical.

What the hell am I blathering about ? Well I have this crazy notion that if data is 3-dimensional, then it should be viewed in 3-dimensions. Neutral hydrogen - HI to its friends - data is a good example, because the data records both position on the sky and recessional velocity (which is a half-decent proxy for distance away from us). Such data is recorded in a Flexible Image Transport System files. What does not currently exist - as far as I'm aware - is a good way of looking at such files in 3D in realtime. Instead, we're reduced to panning through data cubes one slice at a time.

I'm not convinced that this needs to be the case. To that end, I've written a series of IDL and Python programs to import FITS files into Blender. Actually viewing the files in Blender is the easy part. The difficult bit is cleaning the files enough so that Blender can handle them. This is probably more a software than a hardware issue - Blender isn't optimised to handle thousands of different objects and materials, let alone the tens of millions that make up most data files. So for now, this specialised project is only of use in even more specialised cases where most of the data is noise and can be rejected.

However, for those cases where it does work, it works extremely well. Here is the famous "dark galaxy" VIRGOHI21 rendered in Blender, in realtime. It probably could use a minimalist new-age soundtrack, but never mind.

Oh no !

DAMN YOU GOOGLE !!!


A hex upon thee ! May you die screaming from the Ebola virus and your children be thrown into the Pit of Sarlacc ! I'm gonna break your house, burn your legs down, rape your pets and kill your women and not necessarily in that order !

...

Ahem.

...

The astute reader may note that Google has started their umpteenth attempt at a rival service to that dark Satanic rumour-mill that is Facebook. Except that this time it appears that they really mean it, and when Google puts effort into something it usually wins. OK, so Buzz wasn't anything more sophisticated than having an extra email folder, but that's just an example of Google doing something out of boredom. Of Wave I have no knowledge, save that it existed for a little while and didn't do anything.

The problem is that I'd sooner devour the kittens of the previous post than sign up for Facebook. But the problem with Google is that sooner or later this "plus" thingy will be given to every Gmail user whether they want it or not, as is the way of Google's well-intentioned tyranny. So I've gone and joined it anyway, although whether I stay on it is currently a decision resting on the edge of a knife. It certainly is an easy and convenient way to share stuff with select people...

Aaargh ! Don't do this to me Google ! Why must you implement the very thing I despise most ? Can't we all just go back to writing letters ? Or carrier pigeons, how about them ? Couldn't have the social horrors of status updates and Farmville in a network run by pigeons...


And now I've no choice but to upload some more photos and then drink myself into a stupor to ease the pain.

Look at the widdl' kittens wid their widdl' wegs !!

Aaargh ! What to do what to do what to do.... the kittens are getting bigger every day, and they're gonna need housing somehow... somewhere. Unless they remain unofficial astro-kitties relying on the generosity of passing astronomers to survive and continue living in squalor.

Now if I owned my own house and planned to be here for 10 years or more I'd take them on without pausing for breath. But I don't, and I don't. Would my landlord let me have pets ? Probably. Would it be a good idea ? Not so sure. It would be cruel to keep them inside all day because my house is helping to hasten to Heat Death of the Universe by somehow generating vast quantities of heat throughout the day. Nor can them stay outside while I'm away, because of the superabundance of dogs.

But... they're so little ! With their little legs and their little tails and their little noses ! But what if I leave in a year or 3 ? They'd have to spend 6 months in quarantine in the US at least, and getting them to Europe sounds nigh-on impossible. And then I'd feel like a schmuck.

Physicists in the Caribbean

To begin with stating the bleedin' obvious, I've already mentioned physicists many times. What I have not mentioned is the Caribbean, except in the implicit way that it's a big blue watery thing surrounding the island. I think I may have set some kind of terrible, ultra-geeky record by being here 16 weeks and not, until now, having visited the beach. This fact has been rightly greeted with universal disapproval, except by the locals, who rarely bother to go at all.

I've nothing against beaches. But UK beaches offer a choice of sitting on the sand, or sitting on the rocks. You can, of course, paddle, but swimming is for about 10 months of the year something you should only do if you're totally delusional or have lost all feeling on account of a nasty case of leprosy. Consequently, the prospect of a visit to the beach instinctively instills in me a sort of apathetic dread.

However, the Caribbean offers the prospect not only of swimming, but also having something to look at while swimming. The cold green dark murk that is the north Atlantic is replaced with a strange, warm transparent substance, the kind that can only be found in Britain in expensive tropical fish tanks.  Creatures - some call them "fish", I think - that would otherwise require a setup that ordinarily only a James Bond villain could afford can be found swimming around as though they own the place. Which, in fact, they do, because  the locals rarely visit the beach so miles of deserted sand are the norm.

OK, not deserted. I lied about that bit, but I couldn't think of a good word for "having the population density of Alaska". But put it this way - unlike any British beach, you won't have a problem finding a space. Ever. Good frakin' grief, should a Puerto Rican ever visit a British beach, they'd probably die of sheer anger. The idea you might have to pay in a car park for a few square metres of sand with something approaching ice to swim in would probably cause them to shoot a whole a lot of people, judging by the murder rate here.

In the course of this expedition I learned two valuable lessons :
1) I am the world's worst snorkeler, able to consume the equivalent of the Caspian sea no matter how well-fitting the gear, along with enough salt to... umm....  do really salty things.... yes... that'll do
2) "Enough suncream" is not even an oxymoron. It is a purely abstract concept, a Platonic ideal if you will, it certainly cannot actually be achieved in reality. Hence I now resemble a sort of lobster-human hybrid, except without the protective armour and longevity of the lobster. Or its underwater breathing capability. Basically I've been given all the negative aspects of lobserity, namely, being quite red. But not in the photographs, mercifully.

If it were up to me we'd hold group meetings here

This guy is not a physicist. You can tell by the way he's being really awesome.

OK, there's also a lesson 3) I've really wasted my weekends. I'm not making that mistake again...